Keeping out Cheats, Viruses and other unwanted programs on Xbox, Switch, iOS, Windows, Linux & co  

Seminare	2 SWS / 5 ECTS
Veranstalter:	Claudia Eckert
Zeit und Ort:	Preliminary Meeting: Thursday, 06.02.2025 / 10.00 h / Room 01.08.033
Beginn:

General Info

Course Administration: Albert Stark, Katharina Bogad

Organizer contact: seminar-sose25-sos-organizers@aisec.fraunhofer.de 

The lecture is given in english.
The slides are available in english.
The exam will be in english.

Preliminary Meeting

The preliminary meeting will be in presence on 06.02.2025 - 10:00 in room 01.08.033.

While attendance is not mandatory (the slides will be published here) it is heavily encouraged, and will be considered this during topic allocation.

Topic

Modern operating systems often feature some protection schemes intended to guard the system against malicious compromise or modifications of programs. Nearly all modern systems suffer from vulnerabilities or architectural problems, threatening the system's or individual programs integrity. 

This is especially apparent in the constant arms-race with cheats and anti-cheats, or viruses and antivirus software, which continually increase their complexity and invasiveness.

These challenges come more into focus as zero trust architectures fundamentally view any component as untrustworthy, unless proven otherwise. This is useful in scenarios where a specific program may only access a corporate resource, if it has not been modified, similarly to how only unmodified game clients should be able to connect to protected server instances.

In this seminar, the participants will explore different approaches to system integrity by different vendors. The focus lies on the technical methods of protection and detection of system and program integrity. In order to be able to correctly assess the effectiveness of the procedures, it is therefore also necessary to consider corresponding attacks from systems.

Possible topics / ecosystems include:

• Windows
• MacOS/ iPadOS / iOS / tvOS
• Consoles (Switch, Playstation, Xbox)
• Android
• Linux (also Steam Deck/ OS)